


The Persistence of Memory

by Yeomanrand



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek (2009)
Genre: Community: where_no_woman, Episode Related, F/F, Gen, POV Female Character, POV Third Person, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-28
Updated: 2010-12-28
Packaged: 2017-10-14 04:27:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,960
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/145367
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yeomanrand/pseuds/Yeomanrand
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's more going on in Janice Rand's mind than anyone suspects.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Persistence of Memory

**Author's Note:**

  * For [igrockspock](https://archiveofourown.org/users/igrockspock/gifts).



Christine Chapel asks Janice, once, how she manages to be put together and in complete control no matter the crisis or the time of day. Janice has to shrug. She doesn’t really know, and she couldn’t explain even if she did.

Having her head on straight is her _job_ and, like the Captain she serves, she’s never really off-duty.

  


  


In an era when large families are the exception rather than the norm, Janice is the youngest of six children, and one of two girls. But her family is also rural enough to consider going into Town an all-day adventure, so the extra bodies are needed.

The rest of the Rand clan are hurt when Janice leaves for Starfleet, but her brothers taught her not to be afraid to want _more_.

  


  


She keeps her hair short, never more than an inch long. The beehive is a carefully crafted wig; she sometimes thinks everyone must know; she doesn’t have the kind of time she’d need to maintain such an elaborate hairdo, let alone the hair required.

She has her reasons, and one more voluptuous blond Yeoman is unlikely to draw anyone’s eye on a Starfleet ship.

  


  


Captain Pike is terse without rudeness; understandably, he wants tasks done properly the first time, though he’s far more likely to deliver a reprimand with cutting sarcasm than he is to shout. Number One, his First Officer, is much the same, though she at least remembers the occasional compliment or expression of gratitude. Neither of them much notice Janice, and she’s satisfied.

If she were to come to their attention, she wouldn’t be doing her job.

  


  
[   
](http://pics.livejournal.com/yeomanrand/pic/0005ffbb)

One winter solstice, her sister -- home from college with yet another new boyfriend -- gives eight-year-old Janice a set of watercolor paints and brushes and a small book describing how to use them. By the end of the night, Janice feels as though she has used up half the paints, and her hands are all the colors of the rainbow.

Any gift-giving occasion afterward, she always ends up with a veritable cornucopia of art supplies, or texts, or poster prints. When Janice is sixteen, her brothers gift her with a reproduction of _The Metamorphosis of Narcissus_.

She can spend hours contemplating the painting. The irony is not lost on her.

  


  


Number One is more fascinated by her close-cropped copper hair than the elaborate basketweave. Janice is fascinated by One’s icy blue eyes, and the ways their curves fit together.

They are curled up in a small vacation home in Florida when the _Narada_ incident goes down. One is waiting for her ship to be retrofit, Pike wants to break in his new First, and Janice is at liberty because she’s technically between enlistments. One wants her to take time out of space, attend the Academy, but Janice isn’t so sure she wants an officer’s stripes.

After Janice accidentally rolls over on the remote and brings up the newscast, they watch the drill crash into the San Francisco Bay together, One’s long body nestled along Janice’s back and their fingers twined together. Their growing guilt as they gather details makes an uncomfortable third presence for the remainder of their tryst.

But Janice has her life and her ship, and One has already started breaking in her own Yeoman, a tiny third-sex Andorian who is quick and deft but a little disorganized. One insists zie will get better; Janice disagrees, but she also trusts One to know what she’s doing.

Janice could have taken the position herself, but she knows neither she nor One wants to complicate the one simple thing they both have.

  


  


Pike was a distant man, and Jim Kirk flirts like breathing. In most other respects, she thinks, the younger man is from much the same mold as his mentor.

Some of the crew figure there’s more going on behind closed doors. Kirk’s command staff knows better, and Janice has been comfortable all her life with letting people think how they will. For her and, she believes, for Kirk, the flirtation is an innocent game.

Even though she knows better than to assume.

  


  


She throws Kirk off with a move One taught her, sneaking through his guard, and reaches up to pull the stiletto out of her hair. His rough, angry chuckle fills the conference room. She doesn’t look up at his face, keeping her eyes on his chest because he’ll telegraph his moves from there -- and because she doesn’t want to remember his sneer of vicious, possessive lust.

He lunges for her, hand raising as if he intends to slap her. She’s ready for him this time, brings her weapon between his hand and her body and he howls with pain and rage. She loses her grip on the hilt when he yanks away. She’s backing for the door, reaching up to pull the wig off for a makeshift weapon when Mister Spock and Doctor McCoy break into the room.

They pin Kirk until Security arrives; he's still in a demented rage when the red shirts drag him off; Janice watches, hands balled up into fists, her backside braced against the conference room table. The doctor tries to reassure her, but she shakes him off, runs her hand over her face, and tells Acting Captain Spock she’ll be in her quarters if he needs anything.

  


  


Janice does not attend elementary school; her father handles her education while her mother runs the family farm. When she first goes to middle school she is almost painfully shy, and the taunts of her classmates -- over her hair, her clothes, the shape of her body: whatever they figure she might be sensitive about -- are each like tiny shards of glass. She keeps every cut to herself, reminders of a person she doesn’t want to be.

The first friend she makes is Vic -- equally shy, towheaded and strangely gap-toothed; together they spend their afternoon in the crafts hall, learning the ins and outs of oil paints and pottery. She teaches him how to whistle bird calls; he teaches her the importance of white space.

She’s grown used to unwelcome comments and pushy hands by the time she’s nearly done with high school. Older men -- some tourists, but some who she’s known since she was just small -- will often come into her parents’ little boutique shop when she’s working just to watch her.

Sometimes, her brothers or her mother run them off. Sometimes, Janice takes care of them with a sharp word or a gentle reminder of her age, depending on which tack will work better.

Sometimes, though, the man in question just hangs about, as though people in a farming community don’t have enough to do with their days.

By the time her peers figure out they might be interested in more than just catcalling the redheaded girl with the lush curves, she’s already decided she doesn’t need any of them, and she’s not going to settle for anything less than what she wants.

  


  


She’s unsurprised when everyone sort of tiptoes around her for the next little while. She proofreads the Captain’s incident report in a sort of numb haze, recognizing -- as her father would have said -- hindsight is _always_ twenty/twenty.

So much for being level-headed, she thinks, but she can’t share the observation with Christine, who is in full-on psych mode whenever they’re together.

When they end up in line together at mess, Chekov crosses the silent line everyone else seems to be toeing and asks her if she’s going to stay. She looks at him in surprise, catching Uhura’s sudden inhalation and wondering if they all think she’s glass-fragile.

She answers him politely but firmly -- _of course_ she’s staying -- all the while thinking she was on the _Enterprise_ first, and she’ll be damned if she’s going to let Kirk drive her off _her_ ship. Bile rises up in her throat.

Excusing herself, she makes her way to the corridor before she has to bolt for her quarters. The first -- and only -- time she’s ever broken her ground-eating walk on board the ship.

But she reaches Deck 12 before the childish thought leads to an equally childish bout of tears; she cries herself sick, uses some of her allotted comm time to send a message to One, and curls up on her bunk to sleep the first dreamless sleep she’s had since Alfa 177.

  


  


The content of the voice-locked comm One leaves for Janice in response to her distress call isn’t precisely reassuring. But the no-nonsense tale of the genesis of [General Order 7](http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/General_Order_7), in One’s crisp strong voice, is exactly what Janice needs.

She settles her wig on her head and gathers her padd to her chest, much happier with the reflection in the mirror. She heads up to the bridge, already summarizing the memos Kirk will need to sign off on by the time she reaches the turbolift.

  


  


When Janice is eighteen, she and her brother are headed into town when the truck is broadsided by a flashy hovercar. When the police finally arrive, Janice has put a splint on her brother’s shattered leg, despite her own broken collarbone.

She surprises them by answering all their questions calmly, despite the body cooling not fifty feet away. Her brother is a hysterical wreck.

Three weeks later, collarbone half-healed, Janice takes the pieces of glass in her soul, three turkey sandwiches, and their old bluetick hound Samson, and vanishes into the back forty where she can rage and scream and cry all she wants without human interference.

She comes home after three days, and tells her parents she’s enlisting in Starfleet when she finishes healing.

Their disappointment is palpable, but they don’t try to change her mind.

  


  


She doesn’t know where she’s been sent, if there are no stars to see or if she simply has too narrow a view of the galaxy to see any. Or maybe her eyes are closed. She sometimes thinks there is something pressing against her skin, something sticky and constricting. All is nothing and nothingness, the pale echo of being, the shattered fragments of awareness.

She digs her nails into her palm to feel something other than the numbing cold she senses just beyond her skin.

She pictures Charlie’s eyes, paler than Kirk’s, almost the same icy blue as One’s.

The only reason she hasn’t tumbled past reason, when the Thasians return her to the bridge, is the effort she takes to _remember_ against the darkness.

  


  


Slowly, over a number of missions (and helped by the captain taking up with Christine Chapel), she and Kirk return to equilibrium.

Those in the crew who know stop treating her with kid gloves.

  


  


She’s been on ground missions before; the only oddity about this one -- at first -- is the eerie similarity between the planet under her feet and her home, parsecs away. The architecture echoes a particularly hideous period of design in Earth’s past, and yet there’s a part of her itching to settle down with her paints and a canvas to capture the strange beauty of the place.

Until the girl, Miri, turns Kirk’s hand over, revealing an ugly purplish-blue blotch Janice knows can’t possibly be a good sign even before McCoy swears and whips out his scanner. Spock looks on calmly, and Rand pulls out her own padd, starting to organize times and details; how long since transport before Kirk exhibited symptoms, how large the patch is on Kirk’s hand, any little thing she can think of that might have the slightest importance.

Later, when Doctor McCoy is working on a cure and she catches herself begging Kirk to look at her legs, she realizes she’s not afraid of death. But she is _terrified_ of madness.

She’ll be lost if she can’t keep her head on straight.

**Author's Note:**

> Beta as always by the lovely [Shinychimera](http://archiveofourown.org/users/shinychimera/pseuds/shinychimera).


End file.
